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How I spent Saturday

Today was a pretty good day.

I woke up early to bring my car in for its yearly inspection and an oil change. My father was kind enough to give me a ride over, and then back again later to pick the car up. There used to be a pretty convenient train in the morning that would take you from the mechanic (half a block from the station) back to our station (one block from the house), but the LIRR saw fit to muddle with their schedule and only run trains once every hour between those two stations. So it’s just easier to get a ride.

I didn’t do a whole lot else today. I went for a long walk, and I took a very successful nap, and I played with the dog. I also watched a little television.

I watched another episode from the first season of Fringe — I keep waiting, I think maybe in vain, for it to get better than its pilot, which I watched when it first aired last and didn’t love. It’s not an uninteresting show, kind of a glossed-up X-Files, but right now I’m not seeing a whole lot to make me revise my original opinion of the show.

The second episode of the new Doctor Who fared a little better, though I do think it coasted by a little too much on costumes and set design and ultimately couldn’t hide what was a little thinness in its story. It was clever and fun — and thank goodness they didn’t do that click-click-click what-did-the-Doctor-just-see thing again — but it felt strangely cut short. (There were a couple of minutes at the end that were nothing but establishing shots for next week’s episode.) It wasn’t at all disappointing, but that delightful sense of wonder I felt last week did feel a little under-served by the end this week.

And then I got caught up on the last two episodes of Chuck, while I pulled together issues of Kaleidotrope (which with luck will be mailed out before next weekend is out). I’m occasionally mystified by Chuck‘s difficulty in pulling in a bigger audience — it’s a fun action comedy with some great characters — but if the show has to end this season, “Chuck Versus the Other Guy” was a several steps in the right direction and just a cool episode to boot. (Nice to see Mark Sheppard continuing his plot to appear in every television show on the air. Also nice to see, however briefly, Ida from “The Middleman”.)

And finally, this evening, I watched The Informant, starring Matt Damon. It’s kind of an odd movie, but that’s probably because it was a pretty odd story. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that Mark Whitacre is a fascinating character — if you haven’t already hear the This American Life show about his case and all its convolutions, you should. I thought Damon did an excellent job portraying a man who just keeps lying, it seems, because he just doesn’t know what else to do. It’s actually a pretty fun movie, despite all that, and is more a dark comedy than anything else.

And that, such as it was, was my Saturday.

Book sale

I slept okay last night, though more out of quantity than quality. I kept waking up every hour or so throughout the night for some reason, but I think I slept at least eight hours altogether. I was up a little before seven this morning, wandering downstairs soon after in search of the conference and the books I needed the hotel to deliver to our tables. The conference is actually in a separate tower, and it was almost impossible not to get turned around looking for it. Even after the first time I found it. This is a really nice hotel, but it can kind of a maze. (And I’ve been to Atlantic City and Vegas, where the hotels are purposely designed to make it tough to find your way off the casino floor.)

But I did eventually find the conference, and get our pallet of books sent over, and I spent most of the morning setting up the exhibit, unpacking boxes and arranging books and catalogs in what I hoped was a sales-encouraging display. It was a little tough when conference attendees suddenly swarmed the tables, and I had to tell them we weren’t opening until noon and could they, you know, please get out of my way? It’s tough to sell books when the order forms are still inside a box and the “exhibit” is still just random piles of books. But luckily it’s not such a big exhibit, and I finished up by late morning and could go grab an early lunch.

At noon the sales began in earnest — though, given the nature of this conference, there are long stretches when it’s pretty quiet. My boss turned up around two o’clock — which is good, because I was starting to wonder if he’d even arrived in town yet — and we closed up shop around 5 PM.

I walked around San Jose for just a little bit, though never more than three or four blocks from the hotel, and then I wandered back to grab some dinner at the hotel’s fancy Chinese restaurant. What can I say? I’ve been jonesing for a little moo shu pork lately. After that, it was just back up to my hotel room. I’m going to try for a little more local exitement tomorrow night — it is, after all, my birthday — but tonight I mostly felt like coming back to the room and reading. Right now, I’m sort of half-(or may just a quarter)-watching Fringe, which I’ve been kind of meaning to give a second chance. I wasn’t crazy about the pilot, but I hear it actually got kind of interesting after that. But midway through the second season, after a tiring day of selling books to psychologists, and with the sound on mute, probably isn’t the best way to get caught up.

I think now I’m just going to get ready for bed. I forgot the power cord for my laptop anyway, so I have pretty limited battery power to see me through the next couple of days. That and, well, I’ve been on my feet all day and I’m kind of tired.

Monday various

  • I think John Scalzi has it right about this health care bill that passed in the House yesterday:

    As such there was no real political or moral philosophy to the GOP’s action, it was all short-term tactics, i.e., take an idea a majority of people like (health care reform), lie about its particulars long enough and in a dramatic enough fashion to lower the popularity of the idea, and then bellow in angry tones about how the president and the Democrats are ignoring the will of the people. Then publicly align the party with the loudest and most ignorant segment of your supporters, who are in part loud because you’ve encouraged them to scream, and ignorant because you and your allies in the media have been feeding them bad information. Whip it all up until health care becomes the single most important issue for both political parties — an all-in, must win, absolutely cannot lose issue.

  • Meanwhile, Poppy Z. Brite has some harsh things to say about David Simon’s new HBO show Treme. The title of her post should tell you exactly how she feels about their filming in her hometown of New Orleans. It raises some interesting questions — namely, are some wounds too raw to be fictionalized, much less re-enacted for television in the same place? And what, if anything, is Treme‘s responsibility to the neighborhoods in which it films? Is it meeting that responsibility, just by bringing jobs and revenue to the city? (After all, you can’t please everyone, no more how sensitive your approach.) Can Simon, as an outsider to the city, even hope to do the tragedy that was Katrina justice? Frankly, you couldn’t stop me from watching this show, and I think if it’s handled with even half the depth and honesty as The Wire, it could terrific and emotional television.

  • Paul Di Filippo has the line-up for the ultimate Beatles-reunion band. This is either a terrfic or terrible idea, I’m not sure which.

  • Oh great, a book of inspirational quotes from Sarah Palin. I can’t fucking wait. [via]

  • And finally, I’ve mostly avoided all these Chatroulette videos (and the site itself), but Ben Folds’ live-show use of it was surprisingly awesome [via]:

Plumbing the depths

I spent the afternoon today helping my father at a local Boy Scout “Merit Badge University” in Great Neck. Some Long Island troops had put together the event, where Scouts could go from one class to another and learn about the requirements of different merit badges. My father was teaching the plumbing section of Home Repairs, for which he’s a counselor — and for which his large collection of tools and significant experience make him well qualified. (He’s a chemical engineer, so not a plumber by trade, but he’s definitely my go-to person for any home repair questions that I might ever have.)

I should say that, while I was an Eagle Scout and Scouting was a big part of my life growing up, my father has significantly more years invested in it now than I ever did. He stayed on as Scoutmaster for at least half a decade after I graduated and went away to college, for one thing, and he remains actively involved to some extent with several local troops, including the troop that I was a member of as a boy. My involvement today consisted mostly of helping my father carry in all the plumbing supplies he’d brought along to show the scouts, and at one point going back to the classroom to grab a closet auger the boys wanted him to demonstrate in the bathroom across the hall.

We were in a local Jewish temple, in the religious school on the second floor, and it wasn’t a big group. My father’s “class,” which ran from about 1 to 2:30 PM, was just two boys and one of the boys’ fathers. I sat quietly to one side and thought I’d work on the Sunday crossword puzzle, but I ended up not wanting to be rude or distracting to the others, so I mostly just listened. I had plenty of time to work on the crossword puzzle — not quite finishing it just yet — when we got home.

We got takeout at a nearby Azerbaijan restaurant for dinner, and I spent some more time finishing that Wallace and Gromit computer game — just one more episode to download and go — and trying to get caught up on episodes of Chuck. That’s about the extent to the excitement of this Sunday.

Now I’m getting ready for bed. I might watch one more Chuck episode and then that’s it.

Kiss me, I’m Irish!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, everyone! Or, as we like to call it in New York, Drunk Tourists in the Street Before Lunchtime Day! Seriously, I can’t remember seeing this many obnoxious people in matching colors since my last home football game weekend at Penn State. I went for a walk around 12:30, since it was such a nice day outside, and I walked past several dozen bars with cheap shamrock decorations taped to the windows. I hadn’t had lunch yet and already some of these people — some who looked all of twelve or thirteen, I have to say — were can’t-get-up-off-the-ground or shout-random-things-at-strangers drunk. I suspect not a one of them was Irish.

For my (half-Irish on my mother’s side) part, I wore green today but didn’t even think to lift a pint. When I finally did have lunch, it was a slice of pizza and some fruit salad. I do drink on occasion, though almost never in the middle of the day — and then only in social situations — but I find the whole idea of taking the morning off to go binge drinking pretty depressing.

But beyond that, it was actually a really nice day. I sent a project I’m working on to our UK office, to get the ball rolling on a website we’re creating, and I put another manuscript into review. I also spent some time tracking down authors of some older books, with an eye towards developing new editions. So far, only one of them appears to have died since the previous edition, so that’s going well.

I did send out a bunch of rejection letters for Kaleidotrope, though, which is never fun. I noted earlier today on Twitter that when I read a story, I am looking for reasons to reject it. But, more than that, I’m looking for a story that doesn’t give me any reasons. I want to love every story, even if I don’t realistically have room for all of them, but in practice I’m going to love only a very small percentage. The number of stories I’ll hate is an even smaller percentage, of course, but that just means the vast number are somewhere in between. And it’s not that in-between stuff that I’m really looking for.

Anyway, that was my Wednesday. Right now, I think I need to take the dog out, and then I’m going to watch this new FX show Justified and go to bed.